Carroll J. Amundson Professor of British History
I am a social and cultural historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. My research focuses on the history of the body and its relationship to the state, the nation, and the empire. I am the author of Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State (Cambridge, 2020), Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (California, 2010), and Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (Duke, 2005).
I am currently writing a book entitled Registration Nation: Identity, Privacy, and the Recording of Persons in Modern Britain. This book is a social, cultural, and political history of the registration of persons from the 1812 registration of the enslaved, to attempts in the 1960s and 70s to require the registration of Commonwealth immigrants. Civil registration emerged across the globe in the nineteenth century as a tool of modern statecraft. In Britain, the recording of information about a range of bodies and populations, however, was never merely a top-down initiative. Rather, it required the government to engage with diverse publics whose agency shaped policies, practices, knowledge, and in the process the categories that constituted the modern self. This monograph argues that state data-collection about its populations opened up a range of contentious questions about race, gender, sex, class, legal status, personhood, health, freedom, and citizenship. I interrogate these debates to illustrate how knowledge about bodies, individuals, and populations was produced, recorded, and deployed by a range of social actors and to expose the role that public records played in the making of modern identity categories.
I am also co-editor with Tammy M. Proctor (Utah State University) of the Journal of British Studies.
I welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students, particularly those interested in taking a global approach to the study of modern Britain.
- Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 2001
- MA, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1996
- BA, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 1993
Education & Training
- 2024 - Fellow, Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah
- 2023 - Philip C. Sturges Endowed Faculty Prize in History, University of Utah
- 2020 - Gourmand Award, Best in the World (Food Security Category) for Many Mouths
- 2018 - College of Humanities Distinguished Scholar, University of Utah
- 2016-17 - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship
Publications:
Books:
Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain From the Workhouse to the Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
Journal Articles and Book Chapters:
“Bodies,” in Lara Kriegel and Miles Taylor (eds.), New Cambridge History of Britain, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
“Introduction: The End of Print: A Roundtable,” Journal of British Studies, 64 (2025), co-written with Tammy M. Proctor.
“Performance, Pleasure, and Profit at the Victorian Freak Show,” in Michael Chemers, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Analola Santana (eds.), Freak Inheritance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
“Feeding ‘Growing Boys’ and Nourishing ‘Handy English Lads’: British Prison Diets and the Reclamation of the Male Juvenile Offender, 1895-1908,” Gender & History Special Issue on Food, Gender, and Sovereignty, 34(3) 2022.
“’ Why can't 2 brothers?’: World War I and Britain’s Deceased Brother’s Widow Act of 1921,” Journal of Family History, 47(1) 2022.
“Keeping Kosher in the Camp: Feeding Interned British Jews During the First World War,” Immigrants & Minorities, 38(1-2) 2020.
“Dead or Alive?: Stillbirth Registration, Premature Babies, and the Definition of Life in England and Wales, 1836-1960,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 94(1) 2020.
“Atypical Bodies: The Cultural Work of the Victorian Freak Show,” in Joyce Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes (eds.), A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2020).
“Comforts, Clubs, and the Casino: Food and the Perpetuation of the British Class System in First World War Civilian Internment Camps,” Journal of Social History, 52(3) 2019.
“One British Thing: A Bottle of Welfare Orange Juice, c. 1961-71,” Journal of British Studies 57(3) 2018.
“The Parcel is Political: The British Government and the Regulation of Food Parcels for Prisoners of War, 1914-1918,” First World War Studies 9(1) 2018.
“The Politics of Provisioning: Feeding South Asian Prisoners During the First World War,” War & Society 37 (2) 2018.
“British Restaurants and the Gender Politics of the Wartime Midday Meal,” in Sandra Dawson and Mark Crowley (eds.), Home Fronts: Britain and the Empire at War (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017).
“Private Lives, Public Records: Illegitimacy and the Birth Certificate in Twentieth-Century Britain,” Twentieth Century British History 25(2) 2014.
“Skinless Wonders: Body Worlds and the Victorian Freak Show,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 69(1) 2014.
“Roast Beef, the New Poor Law, and the British Nation, 1834-1863,” Journal of British Studies 52(4) 2013.
“Smallpox, Vaccination, and the Marked Body,” in Stephen Rice and Michael Sappol, eds., A Cultural History of the Body: The Age of Empire (Oxford: Berg, 2010).
“Incubator Babies and the Prosthetic Womb,” Victorian Review 35(2) 2009.
“London, Capital of Exotic Exhibitions From 1830 to 1860,” in Nicolas Bancel, et.al., eds., Human Zoos, trans. Teresa Bridgeman (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009).
“The Missing Link and the Hairy Belle: Krao and the Victorian Discourses of Evolution, Imperialism, and Primitive Sexuality,” in Marlene Tromp, ed., Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008).
“Monstrosity, Masculinity, and Medicine: Re-Examining ‘the Elephant Man,’” Cultural and Social History 4(2) 2007.
“Class, Gender, and the Conscientious Objector to Vaccination, 1898-1907,” Journal of British Studies 41(1) January 2002.
"'They Might as Well Brand Us': Working-Class Resistance to Compulsory Vaccination in Victorian England," Social History of Medicine 13(1) April 2000.
Fields:
Modern Britain
History of the Body
Empires
Gender and Sexuality
Power and Inequality
Texts and Contexts
Teaching:
Nineteenth-Century Britain
Twentieth-Century Britain
History of Medicine & the Body
History of Food
